The article presents a wide panorama of consistent types of readerscharacters (in V. G. Belinsky’s terminology – shallow people and Old Believers, people of action and children of a certain doctrine), who on the pages of A. P. Chekhov’s prose and drama works with a different degree of expertise (affectedly, presumptuously, in a silly way, artlessly, passionately) judge the characters, works, literary craftsmanship of I. S. Turgenev, whose life has already expired.